Fulfilling the Promise of Standards

Could it be that their time has come?

Apr 02, 2024

You don’t hear much flack about the Common Core State Standards or about any other curriculum standards these days.

I remember well when this wasn’t the case; when bashing the new national standards for math and English language arts was all the rage.

The height of the controversy occurred less than a decade ago. As an acquisition editor at Harvard Education Press, I had just worked on not one, but two books about the Common Core by veteran education writer Robert Rothman. I was dismayed that the political backlash — from the left and right — had come about just as his very fine books had been published.

Robert (Bob) Rothman’s second book about the Common Core was published in 2013. Bob, who died of cancer in 2021, believed the national standards ”have the strong potential to transform teaching and learning and help bring about the kind of deeper learning that will be increasingly important for all young people.”

I’ve been going down memory lane about standards because I’ve been struck at how embedded they are now in the schools I’ve visited recently. (Of course these are primarily schools practicing competency-based education where learning pathways composed of essential standards drive everything.)

During one visit, I heard a teacher refer to the Common Core by name and I realized how long it’d been since I’d heard anyone say that term out loud!

It also made me wonder whether this much-maligned reform, now that it was out of the spotlight, could be making a quiet comeback of sorts at the grassroots level.

It’s interesting to think about what might have happened if the Common Core — designed to standardize and elevate learning across the 50 states — hadn’t been packaged with two different high-stakes tests funded by the federal government and monetary incentives for using student scores to evaluate teachers.

In hindsight, it was a classic case of overreach, and it spurred a hasty retreat amongst calls to reassert states’ rights and for parents to opt-out of high stakes testing in protest. As the dust settled, states tinkered and renamed the Common Core to make them acceptable to constituents, devised their own tests, and began backing off the use of scores in evaluations. Critics proclaimed the Common Core “failed” or “dead.”

Then along came a little something called Covid-19.

As teachers attempted to triage (for lack of a better term) during the chaos of emergency remote learning and to address learning loss in its wake, experts recommended that they focus on essential standards derived from the Core/state standards. Resources such as Achieve the Core emerged to help.

If district websites are any guide, essential (sometimes called “priority” or “power”) standards appear to be in widespread use — or at least, aspirationally so. Many of these have been constructed with the help of education consultant and author Larry Ainsworth, who advocates prioritizing, not eliminating, standards to guarantee that students master material they’ll need for the following grades.

Advocates of mastery or competency education will tell you that most teachers don’t understand standards as well as they need to in order to spot and remediate learning gaps because of the historical reliance on curriculum programs. These programs may or may not be aligned well to the standards. They also assume that students are at the same place in their learning and learn at the same pace and that teachers will teach the entirety of the program — all faulty assumptions, say advocates.

Ainsworth makes the argument that prioritizing standards from among 70-90 or so per content area makes it more likely that teachers can deliver on the really important stuff. [Although creating a set of ‘”fewer, clearer and higher” standards was a mantra for the creators of the Common Core, they didn’t actually manage the fewer part, according to Rothman.]

It’s through the process of prioritizing standards together that teachers achieve the kind of clarity needed to deliver effective instruction, say Ainsworth and others — ostensibly, the ultimate goal of the Common Core.

My colleague, Dan Joseph, describes this process as “marinating” in standards.

I love this term because it’s so descriptive and memorable. But what does marinating look like?

We’ll post about that next week.

Notes:

https://hep.gse.harvard.edu/9781612501079/something-in-common/

https://hep.gse.harvard.edu/9781612506197/fewer-clearer-higher/

https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/writer-former-edweek-reporter-passes-away/2021/02

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/06/us/common-core.html

https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/ed-magazine/14/09/what-happened-common-core

https://www.chalkbeat.org/2019/10/8/21108964/no-thanks-obama-9-states-no-longer-require-test-scores-be-used-to-judge-teachers/

https://www.nctq.org/publications/State-of-the-States-2022:-Teacher-and-Principal-Evaluation-Policies

https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/teacher-evaluation-an-issue-overview/2015/09